Entered on 01 June 2004 at 9:40 a.m..
Lazy Weekend
This weekend was uneventful. I ran a lot of errands, worked on my scrapbook, and generally lazed about. I can now proudly say though, that I have finished all of the pages in my first 4 years at Georgia Tech and am half way through my time at Cranfield. However I haven't even touched my italy trip. So I'd say that I am currently only about 2 years behind.
In other news, I heard a report on the BBC about the situation in Afghanastan, and how elections are coming soon, but tht the people aren't really as interested in elections as they are in security and other things. The BBC reporter acted as if this was strange. Of course these people aren't interested in elections. For goodness sake.
Why on earth would a people who've never known free elections, and who are currently in some great political limbo, want elections. They've never really had a say in who governed before, why should they start now. They just want their lives to improve, and for their children to have better oportunities than they had. That is as it should be.
The difference between the western journalist and them is that we naturally believe that those things are the responsibility of a democratically elected government. WE believe that who we vote into power will make a dramatic difference in whether our situation will be improved, they don't. They don't really care who is in power as long as their lives get better. To be honest, from the voter turn out in this country I'd have to say that the Afghans have just demonstrated a universal truth.
So it seems that the real story the BBC should have been telling is that, the West wants to shift the responsibility over to a national government as soon as possible, and the only way to legitimately do that is to have some government to hand it over too. Sigh, these things frustrate me a lot.